Manchester, United Kingdom

Industrial Period

The history of Manchester is often told as a story of revolutionary change. Its emergence as the world's first industrial city was dizzyingly rapid and presaged an unprecedented scale and scope of social and economic change. In the mid-sixteenth century, Manchester was a relatively prosperous market town with a population of a few thousand. By 1773, the population was 43,000; by 1801, it was 80,000; and by 1851, well over 300,000. From a proto-industrial base including textiles and clock making, Manchester rose to become the central node in the dense network of southeast Lancashire cotton towns that served as cradle and crucible of the Industrial Revolution. The legacy of this industrial urbanization continues to dominate the city's built environment, labor market, social problems, civic pride, and political myths.

Between 1760 and 1850, Manchester was propelled from provincial center to the world city of an international cotton industry. The root causes of the city's success have been subject to much debate, with some emphasizing geographical advantages such as a damp climate suitable for spinning or proximity to coalfields. More intriguingly, the growth of urbanized labor, new forms of production, and the stimulation of enterprise generated what Peter Hall calls “the world's first innovative milieu.” This set the scene for innovators such as Kay, Hargreaves, Arkwright, and Crompton to drive a decisive shift from domestic to factory production. By 1780, Manchester had become famous as a boomtown and an emerging symbol of all that was best and worst in the new age. By the 1840s, Manchester dominated contemporary reflections on the factory system and the state of England, showcasing the best and worst of capitalist urbanization. The details of this social geography are remarkable, from the extensive middle-class suburbs to the dense, dirty, and diseased working-class dwellings [Page 482]described by Friedrich Engels in 1844 or Elizabeth Gaskell's realist novel Mary Barton in 1848.

The stereotype of a self-made Cottonopolis has much truth to it but requires qualification. Manchester had its share of “dark satanic mills,” but the city center's economy included commercial and service functions as well as factories, warehouses, and weavers. Likewise, for all of its bristling independence, Manchester's history is one of complex and changing interdependencies with cities like Bombay, Alexandria, and New Orleans, which provided the raw cotton to stock Manchester's warehouses and make yarn and cloth in mill towns like Oldham. Also notable is the industrial, if not political cooperation with Liverpool, which by the late eighteenth century had displaced London as England's major cotton port.

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